Google Inactive Account Manager : Manage Your Digital Afterlife

We spend so much time online everyday, contributing to chunks of data through emails, chats, blog posts and social networking, without bothering about what would happen to our online accounts after we die in the real world. People would keep sending you emails and trying to contact you over your social networks even after you have departed from this world. Google has come up with a unique option in form of Inactive Account Manager that lets you manage what to do with your online accounts and data after you have not accessed it for a long time.

Google inactive account manager can be used to set an inactivity timeout period after which your Google account is considered inactive. Its entirely upto you to choose this time period. You would be sent alerts before your account is declared inactive. You can also decide to send notifications to some people through email that your account is inactive. Also if you choose, your account and all the associated data can be deleted permanently after your account becomes inactive.

Here is how you can setup your Google account for the possible inactivity:

Open Google accounts page (https://accounts.google.com/) in your web browser and sign-in to your Google account. There is a high chance that you are perhaps already logged in to one or other of the Google services.

In the Alert me section, you can select alert notifications to be sent to you. You have to enter your mobile number and optionally an alternate email address. Adding a mobile number is mandatory. The alerts would be sent one month before your account is considered to be inactive.

In the Timeout period section, you have to specify the time period during which you must sign-in to your Google account or your account will be considered inactive. You can choose the time period from 3 months, 6 months, 9 months and 1 year.

In the Notify contacts and share data you can add a maximum of ten different contacts like friends or family members who would be notified about your account being set as inactive. You can also choose to share your online data associated with your Google account if you want to. This section also has an option to set automatic response in Gmail which sends a preset automatic reply to any emails received.

In the Optionally delete account section, you can toggle on or off the option to delete your account and all the data associated with it. The account data would be deleted after all your instructed actions have been carried out (like sending notifications to your friends). This would delete all the data associated with your Gogole account including Youtube videos, blogs on Blogger, posts on Google+, emails in Gmail, files in Google Drive etc.

Finally, you have to click on the Enable button to turn on the Inactive Account Manager.